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Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company founded in 2015, developing autonomous systems and intelligent software for military and defense applications. The Hivemind Solutions Perception team is seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer to lead the development of next-generation perception capabilities for autonomous platforms.
In this role, you will architect and deploy advanced machine learning models—including vision, vision-language (VLM), and vision-language-action (VLA) models—that enable autonomous systems to understand, reason about, and interact with their environment. You'll work at the intersection of cutting-edge AI research and production deployment, building the data pipelines, supervised fine-tuning workflows, evaluation frameworks, and deployment infrastructure needed to transform emerging AI capabilities into reliable, mission-ready systems.
Key responsibilities include:
- Designing and implementing state-of-the-art perception models for autonomous platforms
- Developing robust data pipelines and SFT workflows for model training and refinement
- Building evaluation frameworks to validate perception capabilities against mission requirements
- Creating deployment infrastructure to operationalize models on autonomous systems
- Partnering with machine learning researchers, autonomy engineers, and platform teams to translate research into production systems
- Solving practical challenges of deploying advanced AI on operational defense platforms
You'll work with U.S. and international defense customers, contributing to systems that protect service members and civilians. The role offers the opportunity to work on some of the most challenging perception problems in autonomous systems while maintaining a focus on reliability, robustness, and real-world operational impact.
